Environmental ethics – from The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich

The attempt to expand the moral framework to nature and counter human chauvinism by showing that feathers, fur, species membership, and even inorganic compositions are not barriers to the range of ethical consideration.

• Utilitarian theory—support equality of consideration for all sentient life forms
• Moral theory – Requires imaginative empathy, a sense of what it is like to be a creature of that sort
• Animal rights – Increasing human duties and obligations without regarding other animals as moral agents under reciprocal nets of obligation. A bio-centric ethical attitude has respect for nature. Regarding of each living entity as striving to realize its own good and as having the same inherent worth within a network of teleological centers of life.
• Species live within biotic communities; there is no inherent right to life for a species apart from the continued existence of the ecosystem with which it evolves. Humans have duties to ecosystems themselves.